Friday, September 01, 2006

BooksFirst - August 2006

The Algebraist by Ian M. BanksIs Tiny Dancer Really Elton's Little John? by Gavin EdwardsPhotoshop For DummiesPremiere Elements 2 In A SnapThe Duct Tape Book by Jim and TimPlayer Piano by Kurt VonnegutA Tidewater Morning by William StyronLet Freedom Ring by Sean HannityThe Bridges of Madison County by Robert James WallerThe Yuppie HandbookMy Point...And I Do Have One by Ellen Degeneres

Comments

Another poor showing with only two books finished. I finished The Washingtonienne in only a few days. Jessica Cutler's book is a rather thinly veiled account of her sexploits as a Staff Ass on Capitol Hill. I had just heard of Wonkette when that blog broke the Washingtonienne story. The brouhaha was picked up by the Washington Post and the whole story metastasized in the blogosphere as yet another cautionary tale about blogging on and about the job. The original blog was better than the book.

Whenever I am in the Hampden area of Baltimore, I stop into Atomic Books and pick something up if for no other reason than to do my insignificant part of making sure quirky bookstores survive. This time the Tiny Dancer.. trivia book caught my eye. Rock trivia fascinates me, and while I had heard many of these rumors, tales, and legends in other forms, the book was great mind candy.

Every Sunday, in my technolust, I read the tech store fliers to see if there are any bargains I need. One weekend they had the typical price cut and mail-in reabate discount on an Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements bundle. Up to now, I had been using the bundled software that comes with DVD drives and digital cameras. While that stuff is adequate, I wanted some software with a little more third party documentation so I could explore some more. Hence, I went to the adjacent BigBoxOfBooks and used one of their ubiquitous coupons to get some how-to manuals. Hopefully the results will show as I gain more confidence and get more ambitious with my YouTube and GoogleVideo postings.

The last seven books were bought at a church fair where one dollar bought a bag of books. As you can tell, I was stretching to fill the bag. I bought the Preppy Handbook for nostalgia value since I once used this as a manual rather than satire. The other book I genuinely hope to read is the Ellen Degeneres book. Since it was written before she came out, I intend to read it for subtext. I found my first example in the introduction.

As you may have noticed, my mind does not work the same as most. That is to say, I'm sort of, well -- different -- and yet it seems to have worked for me.

I genuinely like her off-beat non-sequitor style and thought her Ellen show was funnier after she came out. At least the romantic subplots were less cringe-inducing.

The rest of the books are either guilty pleasures or bizarre jokes to myself. We'll see how many I get through by next month.

3 comments:

See...this is one of the few times I have to disagree with you. I thought Ellen was funnier beforehand. Afterward it became about the funny lesbian rather than about someone who was funny AND a lesbian, if you get the distinction. I'd always found her funny but we were just getting beaten over the head with the one subject, it seemed.

I'll admit that the coming-out episode was pretty funny, though. But again, I dig the meta-humor.